Lysenkoism and Global Warming Theory

From Forbes: The Disgraceful Episode Of Lysenkoism Brings Us Global Warming Theory

Trofim Lysenko became the Director of the SovietLenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in the 1930s under Josef Stalin. He was an advocate of the theory that characteristics acquired by plants during their lives could be inherited by later generations stemming from the changed plants, which sharply contradicted Mendelian genetics. As a result, Lysenko became a fierce critic of theories of the then rising modern genetics.

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This same practice of Lysenkoism has long been under way in western science in regard to the politically correct theory of man caused, catastrophic, global warming. That theory serves the political fashions of the day in promoting vastly increased government powers and control over the private economy. Advocates of the theory are lionized in the dominant Democrat party controlled media in the U.S., and in leftist controlled media in other countries. Critics of the theory are denounced as “deniers,” and even still bourgeois fascists, with their motives impugned.

Those who promote the theory are favored with billions from government grants and neo-Marxist environmentalist largesse, and official recognition and award. Faked and tampered data and evidence has arisen in favor of the politically correct theory. Is not man-caused, catastrophic global warming now the only theory allowed to be taught in schools in the West?

Those in positions of scientific authority in the West who have collaborated with this new Lysenkoism because they felt they must be politically correct, and/or because of the money, publicity, and recognition to be gained, have disgraced themselves and the integrity of their institutions, organizations and publications.

74 thoughts on “Lysenkoism and Global Warming Theory”

There is a host of self-centred and greedy ulterior motives different people have for supporting the AGW paradigm.

1- For researchers, once a paradigm becomes popular and dominant, it is career limiting to oppose it.

2- If the climate is presented as something about which governments can make policies, then government money will flow for research. If climate is something that we cannot affect, funding is not going to be as forthcoming.

3- Plus of course it gives researchers a good feeling to imagine that they’re working to ‘save the world’ instead of, say, developing a new scent for feminine hygiene products.

4- Environmentalists see carbon emission control as a means to reduce real pollutants like NOx, SO2, Hg, etc. as a side effect.

5- Luddites see carbon strangulation as a way of dismantling the industrial economies to force everyone to a much reduced subsistence.

6- ‘Personal isolationists’ try to use AGW as a way to eliminate big utility companies, with power generated at home from wind, solar, or even car batteries, and even sold to the local grid at retail (or higher) rates.

7- EU trade isolationists see carbon regulation as a way of increasing the energy cost, and thus decreasing the competitiveness, of North American economies _vis a vis_ EU ones.

8- Opportunities to use carbon emissions as pretexts to block or heavily tariff imports abound, thus degrading international trade even further.

9- Local trade isolationists like the idea of overseas products becoming more expensive, and if they can’t do that by punitive tariffs and quotas, they hope to do so by artificially driving up shipping costs.

10- Various people see Kyoto-type agreements as a way of transferring wealth from developed economies to lesser ones, as the one-time Canadian Liberal Party cabinet minister Stewart once claimed.

11- Some also envision carbon strangulation as a pretext for involving governments deeply into the economy, via direct and indirect subsidies for energy alternatives that can claim to be ‘green’. Naturally, those who are involved and invested in such industries have their own greed factor.

12- Believers in Big Government also love the idea of sending governments even more of our money under any pretext, and use carbon taxes as a way to transfer even more money to people in lower income levels.

13- Some politicians see taking ‘the west’ off oil as a means of removing the dependence the US in particular has on politically uncertain sources.

14- Other politicans see ‘cap & trade’ or other quota management as a way to direct corruption to their buddies and relatives.

15- Nuclear energy proponents see carbon strangulation as a way to promote nuclear power.

16- Some people imagine that energy cost reductions will magically pay for, and even squeeze profit from, expensive carbon control technologies whose payback times are actually measured (when they aren’t just dead costs) in decades.

17- Opportunistic “businessmen” see the panic of the masses as an opportunity to solicit donations to so-called “non-profit” organizations or to operate carbon credit companies in order to enrich themselves financially.

18- Financial trading corporations like Goldman Sachs see carbon trading as an opportunity to generate a new financial bubble out of an inexistant commodity (carbon credits) with which to justify huge profits and staggering executive bonuses.

19- In politics it is generally held far more important to be consistent than it is to be right. Lies and errors about warming are thus propagated further, instead of being squelched, in order to bolster the political optics.

20- Some people propose deliberately crushing economic growth to be an improvement over what they think will happen if we let growth proceed naturally.

21- The UN sees carbon credits as an opportunity to create a tax base for itself and a steady income.

22- And there are some who are actually sincere, who desperately want to believe that they can by sacrificing (or by forcing the rest of us to sacrifice) contribute to saving the world. But just because you make a sacrifice to superstition doesn’t mean that your AGW deity is going to come through for you.

Yes wrong he was, indeed his ideas set the then USSR back nearly a generation in terms of genetic science: his ideas endorsed and rewarded by Stalin as the good communist view of how the world should work.

And as wrong as the rejection of so called Jewish science by the then German Nationalist Socialist State: even though that actually produced the atomic bomb. And the Russian version of the Atomic device was the last great triumph of the once Czarist physicists.

Yet the strange thing about Lysenko was that mistaken though he was he was also a superb agronomist who took then Soviet peasant farming into a new era of relatively high production: which was then wasted by collective farming.

I’m impressed Forbes would print something like this, even as an op-ed. Given that the author is a member of the Heartland Inst, he has good background to enjoy defending his essay in the comments.

I keep thinking it’s time to create a page called “climate at the crossroads” (I have a great photo to go with it) and list all the articles from sources that are retreating from going with the alarmist point of view.

“Remember the alarm about the rising sea level? Yeah, that has been rising, as it has been since the end of the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago. Just exactly as it has been, at the same rate.”

Word is out for real now, in a way anybody can fully comprehend. Skeptics were not the ones deceived, but the pent up wrath that activists pointed at them as an evil, dehumanized “other” now has nowhere to go but back to its source.

Even the product design world that I work in is abruptly rejecting green for being a dead end depressing fashion, in favor of high tech.

GlynnMohr, I get into all sorts of squabbles with people as I pick apart the AGW BS. In your list, #6, “personal isolationists”, please understand that there are a few of us who appreciate the beauty and joy of living on the fringe of the wilderness, and we are neither anti-social nor AGW rabble rousers. The various government expenditures make off-grid living a bit easier, with reduced prices for some items and tax deduction/credits/rebates for “green” things. I’d be an idiot not to take advantage of things that my taxes help fund, while they are in place, even though I oppose the programs.

The list is wrong about one thing: carbon taxes won’t go to low-income people. They’ll go to the crony capitalists using government policy to manipulate the energy markets so they can prtofit from uneconomic energy schemes like wind and solar. Carbon taxes will make the super-rich even richer, and poor people even poorer. George Soros and Al Gore andJeff Immelt get richer and fatter while Annie Ogwambo in Tanzania has to burn feces to cook her children’s food.

“Tom… I know that a lot of you will not be keen about my analysis of the pause in global warming…”

Not an unreasonable analysis. However, if there is going to be ever increasing AGW and it accelerated since 1950 or so, then, instead of flat periods the same as the 1940-80 one, we should see the signature of warming in the slope of the pause caused by nat variability. Eg, it should be “unusual” that there would be any declining temp (we’ll wait and see) since the warming signal would modify this sufficiently (0.7C of warming in 100 years) to increase the upslope of these “pauses” as we go forward. If there is, in fact, no modification of the pause slope upward, this, to most honest individuals would indicate that there is no AGW of any significance, just the long term upslope of recovery from the little ice age with natural variation bending the curve about the same amount each time. How say you?

I never blame someone for taking free money. It would be stupid to reject it, no?

You are right, the problem is in the subsidies themselves. Subsidizing inefficiency causes economic problems by the misallocation of resources.

Gary Pearce says:

“If there is, in fact, no modification of the pause slope upward, this, to most honest individuals would indicate that there is no AGW of any significance, just the long term upslope of recovery from the little ice age with natural variation bending the curve about the same amount each time. How say you?”

Cliff Mass’s answer will be interesting. AGW has not caused global warming to accelerate, which would be required if co2 had the claimed effect.

Exactly. The temperature increase before the latest stall in the 1970-2000 period is almost precisely that between 1910-1940 before the stall (about 0.6 degC), and before CO2 concentration topped 300 ppm.

There is no apparent change in the long-standing pattern which would suggest CO2 in the atmosphere is having any significant effect on temperatures.

… To lift climatology out of its backwater status …
… To increase research funding for Academia …
… To justify the de facto political empowerment of a sector of the scientific / academic elite, setting a precedent for the subsequent empowerment of other sectors of that elite.*
… To refresh the raison d’être of the EPA & UN …
… To move environmentalism from the fringes to the center of social concern …
… To justify increased media coverage of environmental issues …
… To give enviro-groups a powerful fund-raising and consciousness-raising tool …
… and allow them access to the levers of national and international power …
… To give activist & green parties a vote-getting wedge issue …
… and a case-study justification for their habitual “hammer” (increased regulation and taxation) …
… To provide at-a-loss “engagé/enragé” types with a new stick with which to bash the beastly bourgeoise…
… To transfer wealth from the West to the South …
… To fund alternative energy developers and researchers …

(* See Pareto on “the circulation of the elites.”)

So why not “warm” to global warming, if you’re:

… a climatologist?
… a bigshot in a boffins’ brigade?
… a university administrator?
… an environmentalist?
… an environmental reporter?
… an official of an environmental organization?
… a UN official?
… a socialist?
… a natural-born “true believer”?
… a country in the global South?
… a worker or investor in an alternative energy company?

For such as those, what’s not to like about “climatism”? It’s all upside—a gravy train that’s glory-bound. It would be tempting to get aboard, wouldn’t it? (Especially after others did so, threatening to leave you on The Wrong Side.)

Lysenko wasn’t completely wrong. The trouble is that things are complicated. Genetics does not, by itself, describe everything and it can look like acquired characteristics can be inherited.

In biology, and specifically genetics, epigenetics is the study of changes in gene expression or cellular phenotype, caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence – hence the name epi- (Greek: επί- over, above, outer) -genetics, some of which are heritable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics

The simple, clear, story is almost never reliable. That’s the story people want to hear though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock They would rather listen to James Hansen than to Roger Pielke Sr. or Judith Curry. Hansen, like Lysenko, is a smart guy and knows more about the climate (or plants in Lysenko’s case) than the vast majority of us. Also like Lysenko, he’s not completely wrong. That’s what is so dangerous about those guys. They do have credibility and they tell a simple, clear, story.

Michael Crichton wrote a piece linking Lysenko with pseudo science AGW.
But the main thrust of his article used Eugenics as an example.
Devastating article.Especially when you consider that Arrhenius,was a major proponent of eugenics.
The godfather of the greenhouse gas theory. ,which has “held up for over 120 years”.
Arrhenius who never made a miscalculation, was an Ahole idiot.http://www.crichton-official.com/essay-stateoffear-whypoliticizedscienceisdangerous.html

There is nothing new or unusual of Lysenko-ism. Lysenko-ism was there when unnamed and forgotten leaders sentenced Socrates to death for asking questions and raise skepticism on the social norms of that time. It was there when Galileo was sentenced for heresy. Lysenko could take comfort that Lysenko-ism will take another name in the future. Perhaps one of the most important result of the past Lysenko-ism was the separation of science from religion or the establishment. It allowed natural scientists to think, experiment and find the truth with minimal interference from the establishment. One of the biggest drawback to the search for truth in natural science in the last century was the complexity and expense of experimentation and data analysis that natural scientists have to get sponsorship by governments . Naturally, natural science is politicized, corrupted and degraded. It is time to separate natural science from politics in the same way that natural science have separated from religion.
On hindsight it is interesting to note, the successful AGW natural scientists have very strong grasp of the basic principles of social sciences especially politics and mob psychology. The success of “natural scientists” in the AGW would be a very good case study in MBA programs , public policy theories and frameworks, and politics. The anti-AGW scientists could prove the AGW “scientists” 100 per cent wrong but as long as their “scientific results” conform to the core belief of the political establishment, the AGW “scientists” will prevail over the 100 pr cent correct anti-AGW scientists. Politicians dont need the AGW “scientists” to be correct. AGW scientists could be 100 per cent wrong, but they are useful as long as they provide some background for politicians and their followers to expound their core belief and agenda. .The recent economic and social turmoil is a window of opportunity for natural science policy entrepreneurs to change public policy — for a “Chinese wall” to separate politics from natural science even if natural science will have to depend on state funding. The current economic and social turmoil will possibly break the coalition of AGW proponents who have different core beliefs but similar policy objectives.

Cliff Mass, using GISS as the basis for your dissertation is a bad start considering all the adjusting that has been going on with that particular set. Then, nowhere in your post is the CO2 sensitivity issue evoked. That’s for the science part.
I do agree with you that unfortunately the issue is out of science hands: PhDs in television watching have very strong opinions about climate and sadly you advocate that they should even have more influence. But, let’s not fool ourselves; it was designed to be so by Maurice Strong and co, politicians first. They knew perfectly well that science is never set in stone, that one major discovery can ruin years of “efforts” and that scientists might be unreliable allies. For that reason among others, they had to move fast as the world had to be saved yesterday, tipping points or else… Yet none of the physical impossibilities and contortions we are witnessing in order to explain what was supposed to not happen anymore due to global warming/climate change were predicted 15 years ago.

If you want to have a serious and honest debate about global warming, you don’t start off by showing the scariest possible graph you can find, and then using it as a basis for the rest of your article. You do know that that graph has undergone many adjustments (each one scarier than the last) over the last number of years. Just over ten years ago, it had 1998 level with 1940, and no other temperature reconstruction, and particularly the most comprehensive ones we have, the satellites, agree with it.

The AMO cycle that you mention has only just come down from its peak and will continue on to its trough for maybe another thirty years, after which it will migrate northwards again, and warm things up a bit again. This century, we will have two cooling phases and one warm, so that by the end of it, temperatures will be pretty much where they were at the start.

Despite increasing emissions of CO2 by humans, CO2 levels in the atmosphere haven’t accelerated in line with those increasing emissions, something you would expect in a world where human emissions are being blamed for all of the rise. Either something else is at play, or humans are not responsible for all of the rise, or both.

And this is without factoring in the quiet sun. Whether this is going to lead to a Dalton or Maunder style minimum remains to be seen, but if it does, then expect to see lots of predictions of a new imminent Ice Age in fifteen years or so. Even though TSI has not precipitously dropped, UV radiation has, and it would appear, this matters.

I would have an easier time believing that humans are having an effect on the planet if it weren’t for the fact that our total energy output amounts to less than a second of sunlight (at the surface) per day. If our energy output isn’t doing it, then it makes it very hard for anything else we do to be having much of an effect.

I think you make much of the warming pause in the Sceptic case but for most sceptics I know this hardly factors. You need to do the math, any person who has looked at the math can see that such high amplification factors are for all practical purposes impossible and climate sensitivity has to be in the range of 0-1.5 degree per doubling or so – Multiple analyses come up with the same estimates.

The issue here seems to be that those who have run the math themselves are invariably Sceptics – now why is that. This is what drives me – FIVE major inconsistencies.

1. That to overcome the negative feedbacks and produce a gain of 3 the positive feedbacks represent a loop gain of 0.95 – That’s impossible in a system as stable as the climate
2. In the rise from the little ice age no more than 0.8 degrees of warming has occured only part of which is explained by CO2 for a CO2 rise of about 120 PPM. So we have seen a 0.8 degree rise in the first 40% of a doubling from 280PPM to 560 PPM – But the IPCC suggest up to 6 degree rise for the next doubling That is for the next 100 PPM they are postulating more than 1 degree due to CO2 ALONE – GIven the history and the logarithmic relationship of Temperature to C02 the next 100 PPM must be less than 0.8 (Actually less than about 0.6) degrees even assuming all the warming is coming from CO2. This says that the IPCC based on the empirical data has sensitivity about 2x too high
3. If we consider all source atmospheric warming of 33 degrees from blackbody and consider that the energy trapping effect of CO2 is 85% exhausted – no the stop bands will not thicken substantially unless Atmospheric pressure is increased. The Amount of extra energy that can be trapped by CO2 is limited to 17%, assuming CO2 drives all warming (It doesn’t gravity- IE Gas Law warming explains most of it) that would suggest that a 100% CO2 atmosphere will drive up temperature by 5.6 Degrees (Work it out yourself) – Contrast this with the upper limit prediction of 6 degrees for a doubling, and you see what nonsense is being promulgated.
4. Finally, the energy budget doesn’t stack up, to create the feedback in the climate. Massive amounts of extra water vapour needs to be cycled through the atmosphere, one needs to evaporate the extra water, raise it a few KM and then rain it down on the planet – the energy to do that SUBTRACTS from the warming energy budget – roll the numbers and you rapidly find that there is insufficient energy in CO2 warming to do what they claim – IE the feedback theory is without a physical basis. You can see what happens in the climate when you have warm conditions in the tropics
5. We know from experience that when we make the climate average hotter – IE around the tropics – we actually moderate the temperature. The Temperature in the Tropics ranges from a night temp of 23 to a day temp about 33 (In south kalimantan) an average of 28 degrees. At Melbourne’s latitude the temperature ranges from about -2 to 40 Across the year an average of 19 degrees or so a difference of 9 degrees. By Averaging 9 degrees hotter in the tropics all we have succeeded in doing is reduce the maximum from 40 to 33 and increase the minimum from -2 to 23 that is all we have managed to do is Moderate the extremes. No-one has ever explained why greenhouse warming can avoid this outcome – already proven in our climate. I can’t see how a more moderate climate is a bad thing – I’ve tried

So, there’s my “independent thinking” – now it would take a warmist to debunk ALL five With Data (Not models) to convert me to warmism, so far noone has done so.

Point of the story, characterising sceptics as relying on the pause to prove their case is completely wrong, doesn’t even factor.

Like Anabaptists of Munster featured in William James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience”, your garden-variety AGW Catastrophist is (let’s face it) no more concerned with “science” as an objective, rational endeavor than were ghost-hunting Spiritualists infesting the British Society for Psychical Research from c. 1890 – 1910. Ever and always, “global warming” is but a peculiarly self-destructive, even vicious, propaganda exercise, designed by rent-seeking ideologues solely to advance their crude, vulgar, ineffably anti-Enlightenment agenda.

Anyone unfamiliar with such names as Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, Keith Farnish, Kentti Linkola, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, hastens to board a cattle-car to their One World Government’s gulag archipelago. Insular and officious Green Gangsters like Briffa, Hansen, Jones, Mann, Trenberth et al. who “know too much” will be among the first to board that train.

In reply to:
GlynnMhor says:
April 28, 2013 at 12:23 pm
There is a host of self-centred and greedy ulterior motives different people have for supporting the AGW paradigm.

William:
Your comments are correct as to the specific reasons why each special interest group supports their ‘green” wash handout. Greenwash raises the cost of electrical power, raises the cost of transportation fuel, reduces the competitiveness of Western countries, results in net job loss, and results in almost no reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. There are always special interest groups that will support handouts and mandated (without funding) government policy. The special interest groups of course do not care if the policy is an irrational waste of money that creates rather than solves any problems.

There is however a deeper level of analysis shows the ‘extreme’ AGW paradigm is going to self-destruct. The extreme AGW paradigm pushes have create a problem (see below for details) for which there is no political solution to. (i.e If one works out the end game, action rather than talk, there is no political acceptable solution.)

Now add the fact that observations and analysis does not support the extreme AGW paradigm. The extreme AGW paradigm sounds like a fine issue to fight an election on. Good luck for the party that pushes the green scams in the next presidential election. Imagine the following issues presented on flip charts. The flip charts would make a dandy electronic handout for interested voters.

The AGW Paradigm’s Achilles’ heel !!!
The extreme AGW paradigm (which observations and analysis does not support) requires CO2 emissions to go to zero. Spending US tax payer money on greenwash (converting food to biofuel is the best example of ‘green’ wash) has no significant affect on total CO2 emissions.

There are 1000 coal fired plants planned in the world. 75% of the 1000 new coal fired plants are planned for China and India.

China, India, and third world countries have requested that Western Countries reduce their emissions by 80% of 1990 emissions (as a show of good faith before they take action) and that they receive roughly $400 billion/year (1% of Western GPD) which will be transferred from Western countries to them to assist with the transition to a carbon free economy before committing to binding reduction.

To reduce carbon dioxide by 80% of 1990 would require that the Western countries move to an all nuclear powered society. There is no other viable option to meet the schedule.
The Western countries are deeply in debt with high unemployment. The Western countries will be required to cut entitlements or face a currency collapse or bond default, without the massive new expenditures to move to a zero carbon economy. There is no free funding to construct nuclear power plants. Additional significant cuts in entitlements would be required to finance this fiasco.

There will be no observed benefit from spending billions of dollars constructing the new nuclear power plants. No Western country will advocate a massive new nuclear power plant program. Greenwash is spending money on scams that do not change anything.

If you’ve ever had a vegetable garden, Lysenko’s ideas strike you as so stupid that you just know there were plenty of Russian farmers who called his ideas stupid. They likely were killed.

Don’t forget his ideas were exported to China, during a time in the 1950’s when Russia and China were all buddy-buddy, and contributed to the terrible famines associated with Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.”

One of Lysenko’s stupid ideas involved plants being taught to work together. (A brotherhood of plants; unionized seedlings.)Therefore you did not need to thin carrots. However, if you’ve ever lacked the time to thin all your carrots, and have an unthinned bunch down at the end of the row, you discover you have many carrots in that patch, but most are as thick as a hair and quite useless. (Unionized carrots don’t work….which leads one to ponder….but I won’t go there.)

Lysenko may have had a few good ideas among all his stupid ones. Most of us do. However his real crime was knowingly playing a part in the oppression and even murder of those who dared to differ. If he had listened, his effect would have been tempered by rational science, however unchecked his effect was the death of millions in Russia and millions more in China.

The fact Climate Science can be compared to Lysenko is a reason for all who have been involved in Climate Science to hang their heads in shame.

The problem with the soft sciences in the USSR was that it was easy to substitute political ideology for science. Not so with math, engineering, physics, chemistry and other hard sciences. Those fields couldn’t be so easily corrupted. In the USSR, this meant the best scientific minds went into the hard sciences (or engineering) and the second- and third-rate students went into soft sciences.

What we need is a mission to send astronauts to Mars. The GI Bill was introduced because it was known there would be problems arising from all the returning soldiers at the end of WW2. They’d need training, jobs, incomes, and futures. I wonder if it’s more than coincidence that the global warming meme got going right around the time that the light began to dim at NASA. I remember all the people who thought the space program was draining societal resources from more imperative needs. So, instead we got the scientific pathology of global warming to ultimately drain even more resources. Perhaps a trip to Mars could be a GI Bill for the scientific community. While it might be astoundingly expensive, would it really be more expensive than the gazillions that would be wasted on useless climate research and even more useless mitigation policies? And, at least it wouldn’t do any damage to personal freedoms. For the end of the world types we could claim that the Mars mission would have the side benefit of spawning technology that would protect their children and grandchildren from asteroid hits. For Obama we could put a really big photograph on Mars that people could see with their telescopes. For Middle-Easterners we could claim Mars as a Sharia zone. For the greens we could put a couple windmills and solar panels on it so the trip would be ecologically responsible. In the end I’d say it’s our last hope to divert people to a grand project where they can’t really cause any harm. And we’ve already got the nuclear rocket engines for it. They were successfully test fired in the Nevada desert way back in the late 1960s.

PS: Back at the end of February I actually wrote a rave equating Global Warming Alarmism with Lysenko. Of course, once you allow yourself to rave you are at risk of invoking “Godwin’s Law,” and I confess my rave did mention Mao and Pol Pot. However Alarmists can exasperate the heck out of me, and sometimes it feels good to just blow off some steam.

I’d also like to see Piltdown Man revisited, showing the appeals to authority, the legitimate discovereries elsewhere that were ignored (e.g. Raymond Dart’s 1924 fossil), the refusal of the authorities to allow a proper examination of the evidence. That sounds so familiar.
I see the Royal Society claim to have not been involved at the time:http://blogs.royalsociety.org/history-of-science/2013/02/04/piltdown-man/

Lysenko was not just a quack scientist. He rose to a position of top political power under Stalin. He was in a position to persecute and kill those who criticized his pseudo-science. A leading world-class geneticist of the day, Nikolay Vavilov was denounced by Lysenko and Stalin and hounded to his death in a labor camp! Lysenko then took over the top post at the great genetics institute that Vavilov had founded and proceeded to arrest and eliminate all of Vavilov’s scientific associates.

Lysenko and his henchmen were murderers in the Bolshevik style. I fear that people like Hansen, Gore, Obama and the AGW elite would do the same thing to skeptics if they could get the full power.

The Pompous Git says:
April 28, 2013 at 12:58 pm
“Is not man-caused, catastrophic global warming now the only theory allowed to be taught in schools in the West?

At the primary and secondary level maybe, but at the tertiary level likely not. The standard texts do not appear to have changed. See, for example, TR Oke’s Boundary Layer Climates.”

I hope that you are correct but I doubt it. Could you give us the details on the texts and how widely they are used.

Every American public college has a “Diversity Dean” whose growing powers have come to include a “Green Office” over the last few years. That is indoctrination, no? Are you sure that there are not a flood of courses with “Green” in the title, courses that supplement the older curriculum?

I hope that you are correct but I doubt it. Could you give us the details on the texts and how widely they are used.

Every American public college has a “Diversity Dean” whose growing powers have come to include a “Green Office” over the last few years. That is indoctrination, no? Are you sure that there are not a flood of courses with “Green” in the title, courses that supplement the older curriculum?

Dunno too much about American colleges since I have never attended one; I live in southern Tasmania. A decade ago I took a first year geology course as part of a degree in philosophy of science. A goodly portion of the course dealt with climate and how it has changed as a result of changing biology, continental configuration etc. The introductory text, Changing Earth by Monro & Wicander contained several references to the fact that there was an anthropegenic global warming theory while also mentioning that “many scientists are not convinced that the global warming trend is the result of of increased human activity related to industrialization”. It also suggest that the students discuss the effect of reducing emissions would have on our standard of living and the global economy. It’s an American text dated 2001. Most of the discussion of climate is the Received View of the 1980s (pre-Hansen).

It’s worth noting that tertiary level science texts contain information that is reasonably certain — not consensus science, but widely agreed science. It seems to take about 20 years for so-called breakthroughs to make it into those texts. Example: Margulis’ theory of eukaryotic organelles was outrageous when I was undertaking first year biology in 1969, but is quite uncontroversial these days and was mentioned in the alternate 1st year geology text along with the effect of phytoplankton’s DMS emissions affecting cloud formation.

As I said, I can’t find a serious consideration of CAGW in any of the tertiary level textbooks I have to hand, even though such might well be expected given that it’s now more than twenty years since I was interviewed on ABC Radio National for my opinion on the matter. Don’t ask what I said BTW; I’m certain it was complete and utter codswallop. But it did reignite my interest in climatology, particularly the paleo sort.

There is nothing new or unusual of Lysenko-ism… It was there when Galileo was sentenced for heresy.

Tosh. Galileo was tried for heresy, the “heresy” being that he insulted his ex-student, the Pope, in print. The Inquisition could not come to agreement about whether this was indeed a heresy and decided to “vehemently suspect” that it was. Galileo’s fame as an inordinately respected sermoniser on matters of the faith may have had somewhat to do with this.

Manifestly junk hypotheses (“science” is the wrong word) go back to Aristotle’s “Physics” with its truly asinine notions of “impetus” which drove Galileo to distraction.

Aristotle created the first written records of significant biological observations concerning marine organisms. He lived between 384 & 322 BC and was asininely oblivious to the d8iscoveries that would be made 2,000 years after his death. He was of Plato’s most famous student. Plato considered intuition as the basis of knowledge. Aristotle disagreed as he believed that accurate observation and description of nature, inductive reasoning and interpretation, were the only way to advance our understanding of the natural world. Now how asinine is that?

Aristotle’s greatest contribution to science was his approach; the forerunner of the modern scientific method. Conspicuously, Aristotle had no real teachers, predecessors, or body of scientific knowledge to build on. He was the first (that we know of) to begin such studies, thus rightly earning the title “Father of Natural History”.

I found no basis prepared; no models to copy… Mine is the first step, and therefore a small one, though worked out with much thought and hard labor. It must be looked at as a first step and judged with indulgence.

Aristotle made many significant contributions to oceanography and marine biology. He regarded the earth as a sphere because of the shadow cast by the earth during eclipses and the gradual disappearance of ships over the horizon. Aristotle described and named 24 species of crustaceans and annelid worms, 40 species of molluscs and echinoderms, and 116 species of fish (all from the Aegean Sea). He recognized cetaceans (dolphins, whales, etc.) as mammals, and correctly described many groups of vertebrates as oviparous or viviparous. When we use the word “species”, we are using the word Aristotle used for that purpose for probably the very first time.

And that’s without considering Aristotle being the first to codify logic! Asinine? ‘Tis you Lloyd Martin Hendaye that is asinine to calumniiate the greatest thinker of the last several millennia.

As CommieBob pointed out, Lysenko’s major idea and the one for which he appears to be condemned to be ridiculed through the ages, is that plants can alter their morphology in resonse to the environment. While this notion was good for raising guffaws for a few years, it is now widely studied in a variety of organisms and is a fairly respectable branch of genetics called epigentics. Even before Lysenko’s death, his ideas were already being seriously studied in the west albeit under another name. Organisms including human beings, can turn genes on and off in their offspring depending on the conditions in which the parents are living. Lysenko was apparently not very nice on a bunch of levels unrelated to his agricultural ideas, as some of the other commentors have pointed out. We also have to remember that he was operating in and around a madman (Stalin) who murdered almost every competent official he ever had. It may be a mark of genius that Lysenko managed to survive at all. And of course, the West was only too happy to have an apparent mad Soviet scientist to ridicule in the 50s and 60s as we were was so badly humiliated in the space race. The USSR itself had to denounce Lysenko resoundly when he was no longer in favour in keeping with their policy of defaming the deposed. If there is one thing we can learn from history, it is that history is only in the eye of the beholder. Given who writes the history books now, who will history hold to account for the Y2K scam and who will it hold to accound for the Savings and Loan crisis or the Subprime mortgage crisis? There are a lot of people who should be ridiculed who never will be and perhaps Trofim Lysenko receives more than his fair share.

re your excuses for Trofim Lysenko in your post at April 29, 2013 at 12:13 am.

There was a tiny kernel of truth in Lysenko’s ideas.
The little truth was exaggerated to become lies.
The lies were used as excuses for political policies.The political policies killed millions.
Lysenko supported the political policies.

There is a tiny kernel of truth in the AGW-hypothesis.
That little truth has been exaggerated to become lies.
The lies are being used as excuses for political policies.The political policies would kill billions if fully enacted.
AGW-supporters promote the political policies.

For decades some, including me, have been proclaiming that AGW is Lysenkoist.

Lysenko was indeed a frustrated epigeneticist. He observed plants to some degree expressing epigenes to compensate for environmental stressors. Unfortunately, he lacked the scientific tools to carry his research further in the 1930s to 1950s and he had an autodidactic dictator named Joseph Stalin breathing down his neck demanding that Lysenko turn his observation into dogma so that Stalin could win his ideological argument with another autodidactic dictator named Adolf Hitler who was pushing eugenics. before his findings were ready for prime time. In fact it would be 70 years before Lysenko’s findings might start to be ready for prime time. No wonder Lysenko’s science ended badly.Because it was turned into an “ism”.
And of course the religious Green deep ecologist autodidacts(maybe with some funding from Islamic Greens attempting to protect their market share) have been attempting to do the same with climate science. And yes, conservatives have been trying to dogmatically do the same on the other side of the issue. Naturally climate science suffers from the demogogues of both sides.

If Aristotle had failures and flaws, I would point out that perhaps the most important was that he did not create a day-to-day practice or a tradition of “testing and experimentation” AGAINST “consensus thought”. That is, he was so great and so profound in developing and requiring elaborate logic paths and discussions that those “became law” and so “science” failed UNTIL Aristotelian dogma could be ignored or debunked. Even in the 1750 – 1850 timeframe, experimenters in electricity, medicine, chemistry, and astronomy were fighting the perception that they were “heretics” against established traditional teaching (ie, they were fighting “logic” and fundamental “consensus of the experts” each time they proposed something original.)

That is, he himself became “The Science” and “The Expert” and so the rest of the world was prevented from the “concept” of fresh ideas and the practice of experimenting and guessing and exploring the contradictions between observed data. Aristotle’s “Logic” for example, would never have permitted the gold foil experiments that reflected alpha particles back from the nuclei of atoms.

Against, that’s one major flaw in Einstein’s very popular “thought experiments” of ever elaborate but intrinsically impossible physics experiments to try to prove one idea or another: A thought experiment can’t show what the real world actually is. It can’t “prove” anything. Ever. (Except the logic of the speaker. Which may or may not be correct.)

The extreme AGW paradigm pushers are hiding observations and analysis that indicates a doubling of atmospheric CO2 will result in less than 1C warming. An obvious observation to support the assertion that there will be less than 1Cwarming is there was been no warming for the last 16 years. The observations indicate something is fundamentally incorrect with the general circulation models that ‘project’ a warming of 3C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from 0.028% to 0.056% is absurdly high.

The general circulation models that were used to project a warming of 3C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 predicted and require to create the 3C warming, that would be warming of the tropical troposphere at around 8 km above the planet’s surface. The warming at this level in the atmosphere occurs due to a predicted increase in water vapour at this altitude and due to increased CO2 at altitude in the atmosphere. The tropic tropospheric warming at around 8km then warms the tropics by long wave radiation. There is no observed tropospheric warming at 8 km. One of the major physical reasons for the lack of warming is found in Lindzen and Choi (2011) analysis (See link to paper below) that low level cloud cover in the tropics increases or decreases in to resist planetary temperature forcing changes by reflecting more or less sunlight off into space.

This is a link to a review paper that was prepared by EPA’s own scientist that supports the assertion that the research and analysis does not support the extreme AGW paradigm. The EPA buried the report. The EPA and IPCC of course are completely ignoring the data and logic that indicates the majority of the 20th/21st warming was not due to the rise in atmospheric CO2.

“Technical Support Document for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act”
“I have become increasingly concerned that EPA has itself paid too little attention to the science of global warming. EPA and others have tended to accept the findings reached by outside groups, particularly the IPCC and the CCSP, as being correct without a careful and critical examination of their conclusions and documentation. If they should be found to be incorrect at a later date, however, and EPA is found not to have made a really careful independent review of them before reaching its decisions on endangerment, it appears likely that it is EPA rather than these other groups that may be blamed for any errors. Restricting the source of inputs into the process to these two sources may make EPA’s current task easier but it may come with enormous costs later if they should result in policies that may not be scientifically supportable. The failings are listed below in decreasing order of importance in my view: (See attached for details.)

1. Lack of observed upper tropospheric heating in the tropics (see Section 2.9 for a detailed discussion).
2. Lack of observed constant humidity levels, a very important assumption of all the IPCC models, as CO2levels have risen (see Section 1.7).
3. The most reliable sets of global temperature data we have, using satellite microwave sounding units, show no appreciable temperature increases during the critical period 1978-1997, just when the surface station data show a pronounced rise (see Section 2.4). Satellite data after 1998 is also inconsistent with the GHG/CO2/AGW hypothesis 2009 v
4. The models used by the IPCC do not take into account or show the most important ocean oscillations which clearly do affect global temperatures, namely, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and the ENSO (Section 2.4). Leaving out any major potential causes for global warming from the analysis results in the likely misattribution of the effects of these oscillations to the GHGs/CO2 and hence is likely to overstate their importance as a cause for climate change.
5. The models and the IPCC ignored the possibility of indirect solar variability (Section 2.5), which if important would again be likely to have the effect of overstating the importance of GHGs/CO2.
6. The models and the IPCC ignored the possibility that there may be other significant natural effects on global temperatures that we do not yet understand (Section 2.4). This possibility invalidates their statements that one must assume anthropogenic sources in order to duplicate the temperature record. The 1998 spike in global temperatures is very difficult to explain in any other way (see Section 2.4).
7. Surface global temperature data may have been hopelessly corrupted by the urban heat island effect and other problems which may explain some portion of the warming that would otherwise be attributed to GHGs/CO2. In fact, the Draft TSD refers almost exclusively in Section 5 to surface rather than satellite data.”

“2.9 The Missing Heating in the Tropical Troposphere
Computer models based on the theory of GHG/CO2 warming predict that the troposphere in the tropics should warm faster than the surface in response to increasing CO2 concentrations, because that is where the CO2 greenhouse effect operates. Sun-Cosmic ray warming will warm the troposphere more uniformly.

The UN’s IPCC AR4 report includes a set of plots of computer model predicted rate of temperature change from the surface to 30 km altitude and over all latitudes for 5 types of climate forcings as shown below.

The Hadley Centre’s real-world plot of radiosonde temperature observations shown below, however, does not show the projected CO2 induced global warming hot-spot at all. The predicted hot-spot is entirely absent from the observational record. This shows that most of the global temperature change cannot be attributed to increasing CO2 concentrations.”

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/DOUGLASPAPER.pdf
“ A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions
We examine tropospheric temperature trends of 67 runs from 22 ‘Climate of the 20th Century’ model simulations and try to reconcile them with the best available updated observations (in the tropics during the satellite era). Model results and observed temperature trends are in disagreement in most of the tropical troposphere, being separated by more than twice the uncertainty of the model mean. In layers near 5 km, the modelled trend is 100 to 300% higher than observed, and, above 8 km, modelled and observed trends have opposite signs. These conclusions contrast strongly with those of recent publications based on essentially the same data.”

“On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications
Richard S. Lindzen1 and Yong-Sang Choi2

We estimate climate sensitivity from observations, using the deseasonalized fluctuations in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and the concurrent fluctuations in the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) outgoing radiation from the ERBE (1985-1999) and CERES (2000- 2008) satellite instruments. Distinct periods of warming and cooling in the SSTs were used to evaluate feedbacks. An earlier study (Lindzen and Choi, 2009) was subject to significant criticisms. The present paper is an expansion of the earlier paper where the various criticisms are taken into account. … … We argue that feedbacks are largely concentrated in the tropics, and the tropical feedbacks can be adjusted to account for their impact on the globe as a whole. Indeed, we show that including all CERES data (not just from the tropics) leads to results similar to what are obtained for the tropics alone – though with more noise. We again find that the outgoing radiation resulting from SST fluctuations exceeds the zerofeedback response thus implying negative feedback. In contrast to this, the calculated TOA outgoing radiation fluxes from 11 atmospheric models forced by the observed SST are less than the zerofeedback response, consistent with the positive feedbacks that characterize these models. …. …The heart of the global warming issue is so-called greenhouse warming. This refers to the fact that the earth balances the heat received from the sun (mostly in the visible spectrum) by radiating in the infrared portion of the spectrum back to space. Gases that are relatively transparent to visible light but strongly absorbent in the infrared (greenhouse gases) interfere with the cooling of the planet, forcing it to become warmer in order to emit sufficient infrared radiation to balance the net incoming sunlight (Lindzen, 1999). By net incoming sunlight, we mean that portion of the sun’s radiation that is not reflected back to space by clouds, aerosols and the earth’s surface. CO2, a relatively minor greenhouse gas, has increased significantly since the beginning of the industrial age from about 280 ppmv to about 390 ppmv, presumably due mostly to man’s emissions. This is the focus of current concerns. However, warming from a doubling of CO2 would only be about 1C (based on simple calculations where the radiation altitude and the Planck temperature depend on wavelength in accordance with the attenuation coefficients of well mixed CO2 molecules; a doubling of any concentration in ppmv produces the same warming because of the logarithmic dependence of CO2’s absorption on the amount of CO2) (IPCC, 2007). This modest warming is much less than current climate models suggest for a doubling of CO2. Models predict warming of from 1.5C to 5C and even more for a doubling of CO2. Model predictions depend on the ‘feedback’ within models from the more important greenhouse substances, water vapor and clouds. Within all current climate models, water vapor increases with increasing temperature so as to further inhibit infrared cooling. Clouds also change so that their visible reflectivity decreases, causing increased solar absorption and warming of the earth. Cloud feedbacks are still considered to be highly uncertain (IPCC, 2007), but the fact that these feedbacks are strongly positive in most models is considered to be an indication that the result is basically correct. …”

If Aristotle had failures and flaws, I would point out that perhaps the most important was that he did not create a day-to-day practice or a tradition of “testing and experimentation” AGAINST “consensus thought”.

I rather thought Aristotle went against the consensus of his day. Plato and his followers claimed that empirical observation was unreliable; Aristotle believed empirical observation was of primary importance. Yes, it was somewhat remiss of him to fail to invent processes that took the rest of humanity 2,000 years to discover, but that’s the way things turned out. And of course he was to blame for his words to be turned into dogma 1,400 years after his death. Shameless of him really!

BTW, if you believe logic to be so flawed, how come you are using a computer?

Earlier this year James Lovelock recanting his position on AGW. Yes, it was reported in the MSM and here at WUWT. Did Dr. Lovelock’s recantation made any difference to the political landscape of AGW? Is there an ongoing re-evaluation of all the scientific studies that were influenced by Dr. Lovelock? If on the road to one of the UN meetings, all prominent members of the AGW team will see the light, pity their future generations who will absorb the criticisms of their peers and in unison recant their position with truthfulness and dignity, do you think it will change the AGW political landscape? AGW will just be replaced by another issue. It took an earthquake to change japan’s position on coal power, severe economic crisis and austerity measures in Europe for european politicians to abandon support of the carbon price, etc. Australian economy is doing well in the past few years so it has the luxury of having the most expenses carbon price today at approximately $23/ton. Will another scientists recantation change the australian position ? Or will an economic and social change have more significant impact?

Your post was not factual in that neither BCBill nor I were making excuses for Lysenko. Things are complicated and history really is in the eyes of the beholder. The best people of good will can do is look at the issue from all sides to try and figure out what really happened. Trying to examine and discover reasons is not the same as making excuses.

Your post was not factual in that neither BCBill nor I were making excuses for Lysenko. Things are complicated and history really is in the eyes of the beholder. The best people of good will can do is look at the issue from all sides to try and figure out what really happened. Trying to examine and discover reasons is not the same as making excuses.

Bollocks!
You and BCBill were – and are – trolling by attempting to distract the thread onto discussion of whether Lysenko was misunderstood. To that end, you and he were making excuses for his actions.

TO GET THE THREAD BACK ON TOPIC
I can do no better than to quote all of my post to BCBill which you flamed.
It said

BCBill:

re your excuses for Trofim Lysenko in your post at April 29, 2013 at 12:13 am.

There was a tiny kernel of truth in Lysenko’s ideas.
The little truth was exaggerated to become lies.
The lies were used as excuses for political policies.The political policies killed millions.
Lysenko supported the political policies.

There is a tiny kernel of truth in the AGW-hypothesis.
That little truth has been exaggerated to become lies.
The lies are being used as excuses for political policies.The political policies would kill billions if fully enacted.
AGW-supporters promote the political policies.

For decades some, including me, have been proclaiming that AGW is Lysenkoist.

I can answer the question about CAGW being taught in the universities. I teach at a primarily U-grad university. There are many professors who have very strong opinions and work the CAGW meme into their courses. These are mostly English, History, and especially Sociology professors who know almost no science. There are also always a few biologists, primarily ecologists, who are always afraid that man, technology, and fossil fuels will destroy the planet and some of these will have a special course or a good chunk of a course on CAGW taught as straight propaganda. The physicists and chemists and even molecular biologists are more skeptical. About half of these may be willing to accept the idea of a “consensus” (or at least until recently did) but they understand there are uncertainties and they do not go out of there way to be alarmists or spout off about things they have not looked into. The other half of chemists and physicists have looked into it and are rational skeptics who believe that CAGW is a huge exaggeration that is sucking money out of science funding that could be saving lives. Given that the sociologists and ecologists still think that Paul Ehrlich is a great mind, despite 50 years of being wrong I have no real hope that this group will ever be convinced by actual data. For them it is emotional and political – i.e. a moral issue. One could critique some on the other side for similar reasons of course, but eventually one side will be proven correct. The interesting thing is when the truth does not seem to matter. Bewildering.

f you’re defining Lysenkoism simply as big brother interfering in science then I guess you could really claim that almost any scientific theory is Lysenkoism. Cell theory? Supported by gub’mint. Evolution? Definitely supported by gub’mint. Using this broad net of “money-grubbing scientists” we can choose to disbelieve in nearly anything. It’s a weak and awful argument, and it weakens the position of this website to post it as anything other than an example of what not to do.

richardscourtney says:
April 29, 2013 at 5:07 am
“There was a tiny kernel of truth in Lysenko’s ideas.
The little truth was exaggerated to become lies.
The lies were used as excuses for political policies.
The political policies killed millions.
Lysenko supported the political policies.

There is a tiny kernel of truth in the AGW-hypothesis.
That little truth has been exaggerated to become lies.
The lies are being used as excuses for political policies.
The political policies would kill billions if fully enacted.
AGW-supporters promote the political policies.”

Ryan says:
April 29, 2013 at 6:20 am

Governments can encourage science or governments can hijack science to their own ends.
Read what Richardscourney has posted. Do you still not see a dangerous parrallel between Lysenkoism and todays AGW theory.
Open your eyes man.

Lysenkoism and AGW catastrophism both originated more in politics than science, but actually, the inheritance of acquired characteristics in plants was demonstrated by Barbara Mcclintock, and she received the Nobel prize in 1983 after she had to endure the usual bad treatment from the orthodoxy.

There is also increasing evidence that it applies in animals, too. Check out Prof. Denis Noble’s site http://musicoflife.co.uk/ for a video lecture and a nice PDF covering the topic.

Ryan; your argument is the one that is weak and invalid; Science is what it is without respect to who supports it.

What government does is fund that which they find to their advantage. To wit; they really do not support evolution, though they do support genetics research. They do support cosmology and particle physics, but in that case; only true results will work to their advantage. If it wall all based on b.s.; GPS wouldn’t work and a whole lot of other failed technology would demonstrate the fraud.

In the case of climate science; it simply does not say anything alarming. It does say that the earth has warmed. To some degree, more or less. Since the LIA. It appears there is correlation to CO2 increase, at least some of which is definitely anthropogenic. There is basic physics which demonstrates that increased CO2 concentration tends to lead to higher ambient temperature.

There is no science beyond that, as relates to the CAGW theory. No science that says it will be catastrophic in any way, no science that says the glaciers will all melt by 2035, or the at the polar ice caps will melt by 2100, or that polar bears will be exterminated as a result of CO2. There is no science that says New York City or London, or any other town, will be submerged by sea level rise produced from CO2. The maldives problem has to do with their fishing methodology and ‘fresh water lensing’, rather than sea level rise.

Finally; Anyone who suggests that it is in fact ‘climate disruption’, ‘global weirding’ or any other such thing is actually just scare mongering, wholesale. Hurricanes do not relate to global warming in any meaningful way, and Sandy and Katrina are demonstrably the result of demographics rather than any tropical cyclone heat energy trend.

And the “scientists” who engage in this scaremongering are no longer scientists. Science requires disinterest. They have planted their flag and are no longer qualified to collect the data, preserve the data or interpret the data.

Once they claimed they knew the answer and the science was settled to a political solution, they should have been relieved of their research status.

It is that simple.

In short; big brother may support science, but if their interest is policy based, rather than directly related to technology, then what they are supporting is propaganda, not science.

But it was a great scam while it lasted.
Progressive;”Forward”.
The hydra will pop up new heads, fresh water, flu pandemics and patriotism are all being developed.
Agenda 21 is openly admitted by the UN, so what of those who claimed we were conspiracy fools?
What gets rewarded will continue and grow.
Our bureaucracies and politicians will continue to lie, steal and destroy, until we stop them.
Incompetence, arrogance and idiocy are the norm within the bureaus of our nations.
Promote the clueless and dangerously useless is common practice of government.
When was a thief, corrupt practitioner or liar punished?
In Canada, a corrupt political party stole over $40 million, yet no one is in gaol.
And this is clump change, from the politicians POV, a mere crumb of what our governments waste, destroy and disappear.

Lysenko wasn’t completely wrong. The trouble is that things are complicated.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Lysenko was wrong and his name has become a by-word for polically driven science.
Things are quite simple if you understand that such is the problem with AGW theory and its advocates..

The comment threads in this and the previous WUWT article have been … interesting. And somewhat distressing. Since the change in the WUWT comments process, it seems that the discussions are becoming more rapid and more personal. They appear to me to be taking on more aspects of the flamewars that make so many other internet forums unreadable.

I suspect (but can not yet prove) that this change in tone is the result of the instant posting of comments. The old moderation was slow and while that delay had some disadvantages, it seemed to me to add time for reflection. Misunderstandings and even harsh words were still exchanged but the debates did not seem quite so quick to decay into personal attacks and recriminations.

Am I viewing the old process through my own rose-colored glasses or are others seeing the same change in tone?

Sorry the “flame wars” trouble you. I think the subject of Lysenko is bound to bring the blood of many to a boil. (More so than a discussion of the effects of equatorial currents on the production of biological dms emissions, at any rate.)

Personally, I don’t mind when people speak to me with passion, (even if they insult me,) provided they supply some points I hadn’t considered, and give me links where I can go and see things from a new angle.

If everything is too silky and smooth, you have no traction. Grit might not be pleasant, but it does supply traction.

I appreciate your dignity and manners, which are very important to civil procedure. However, when it comes to hearing grouches like myself, I hope you can learn to grin and bear it.

Good evening, Caleb. Yeah, I wondered after submitting that comment how much of the tone was the result of the rapid comments and how much (if any) was psychological priming based on the topic. And for the record, I am okay with a “robust” discussion as long as I can learn from it. That generally stops when the thread devolves into personal attacks. I found no complaints with your comments but some of the others were … less illuminating, shall we say.

Thank you for your response. I will add southern Tasmania to my list of safe places.

You’re welcome. It is a very special place and I’m truly grateful that I found it in 1970. If you are ever in this part of the world, do look me up. If you think you could stand a conversation with a long-haired, back-to-the-land hippy with a passion for gourmet food and wine :-)

CO2 Is, without question, capable of absorbing infra red radiation that would otherwise leave the earth. CO2 is also the source of 100% of the food we eat. There are credible studies, that were done prior to the politicization of this issue that predicted a near-doubling of agricultural productivity with a doubling of CO2 concentration.

Any discussion that attempts to quantify the societal loss resulting from the burning of carbon does not take both the positive and the negative impact into account is simply not science. It is propaganda. The last century provides some vivid lessons as to the results of policies based upon propaganda. How many people did Lysenko kill? If Lysenko were alive today, where would he be working?

Chris Riley says: @ April 30, 2013 at 6:29 pm
…The last century provides some vivid lessons as to the results of policies based upon propaganda. How many people did Lysenko kill? …
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You might be interested in Dr Rummel’s DEATH BY GOVERNMENT or Democide, the murder of citizens by their own government.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Among all the democide estimates appearing in this book, some have been revised upward. I have changed that for Mao’s famine, 1958-1962, from zero to 38,000,000. And thus I have had to change the overall democide for the PRC (1928-1987) from 38,702,000 to 76,702,000….

…..After eight-years and almost daily reading and recording of men, women, and children by the tens of millions being tortured or beaten to death, hung, shot, and buried alive, burned or starved to death, stabbed or chopped into pieces, and murdered in all the other ways creative and imaginative human beings can devise, I have never been so happy to conclude a project. I have not found it easy to read time and time again about the horrors innocent people have been forced to suffer. What has kept me at this was the belief, as preliminary research seemed to suggest, that there was a positive solution to all this killing and a clear course of political action and policy to end it. And the results verify this. The problem is Power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom.….

No one should forget that governments KILL and it is just a short step to a totalitarian state when a government has amassed enough power.